The Bush Dam Breaks

Published on Tuesday, June 21, 2005 by The Progressive
By Matthew Rothschild

The Bush dam is beginning to crumble.

The dam that defied opposition to the Iraq War.

The dam that kept Republicans from coming to their senses on Social Security.

The dam that held back critics of the USA Patriot Act.

It's no longer holding.

Bush's popularity is in the low forties, and may get to the freezing point soon.

And so his ability to keep getting away with "disassembling," as he would put it, is being washed away.

46 percent of Americans want U.S. troops to leave Iraq now.

Even Republicans are signing on to bills demanding a timeline for withdrawal.

Bush's puerile fantasy of destroying Social Security is all but shattered.

And he just lost a big one on the Patriot Act.

The House on Wednesday voted 238 to 187 not to renew the section of the Patriot Act that allows authorities to find out what books you've been checking out of the library or buying at the bookstore.

Bernie Sanders, the great independent socialist from Vermont who may be a U.S. Senator next year, led the fight. But he was joined by 38 Republicans.

This success didn't come out of nowhere. And it's not just to Sanders's credit.

It's because of impressive organizing by the ACLU and by a group of grassroots activists who formed Bill of Rights Committees around the country and passed 382 resolutions in cities and towns and in seven states denouncing the repressive aspects of the Patriot Act.

That's how we win.

And hats off to John Conyers!

Where would we be without him?

The Congressman from Michigan was instrumental in drawing attention to the voting improprieties in Ohio.

And now he's leading the way on the Downing Street Memo, exposing the charade that was George W. Bush's entire windup to the Iraq War.

Conyers held an impressive hearing on the subject on Thursday, and he rounded up more than 100 Congressional Democrats and more than 500,000 citizens to sign a petition to Bush demanding a detailed response to the memo.

In rising to this challenge, Conyers showed once again that he's a fearless champion of our side, which is the side of democracy.

But hats off also to the folks at downingstreetmemo.com, who have been shouting from the treetops about this ever since it came out in early May.

With no help from the mainstream media, they were able to organize on the Internet and tap into the outrage that so many of us feel about how Bush lied the nation into war.

This memo is indeed the smoking gun.

And hats off, too, to Amy Goodman at Democracy Now and all the folks on progressive talk radio who drew attention to it day after day, including Stephanie Miller, Janeane Garofalo, Al Franken, Laura Flanders, Ed Schultz, Randy Rhodes, and Mike Malloy.

Our echo chamber is getting louder and louder, and we're finally waking up the neighbors.